The Way I Used to Be (39 page)

Silence.

I slowly uncover my eyes. I expect him to be looking at me. But he's not; his hands are covering his ears, his eyes shut tight. He's slumped forward, toward me, his body folded in on itself. He doesn't move; I don't even hear him breathe. I don't know what to say next so I say nothing. I leave him be. Let him process. Hope that he believes me, that he picks my side. I wait.

“I . . . ,” he begins, but stops. I look up at him. “I—I just don't understand what you're saying, Edy,” he mumbles into his hands. Then he pulls himself up and looks at me. “I don't un-der-stand how this happened.” He says each word, each syllable, separately—precisely, carefully. He studies my face, searching, but I don't understand either.

Then he's on his feet fast. And he's pacing, like he's thinking too many things all at once. “No,” I hear him mutter as he walks out of sight around the corner and into his bedroom. I almost call after him, but just as I open my mouth I hear what sounds like a dump truck driving into the side of the house, and Caelin screaming “FUCK” over and over, in this guttural, animal way.

My feet can't resist taking me to his door. I look at what he's done, what he's doing. Everything that was sitting on top of his dresser—all the relics of his high school glory: basketball trophies, medals, certificates, photos, and these model cars that he and Kevin spent eternities working on together—is now just a broken, mangled pile of memory vomit on the floor. And he's kicking his closet door over and over, with his bare feet.

He always keeps such a tight lid on everything. I mean, I've seen him mad, of course, I've seen him nasty at times, but never like this. He spins around, now at his dresser again and his hands grip the edges so tight. I put my hand over my mouth to keep from yelling at him to stop, because I know what he's about to do—he's about to throw the dresser on the floor. This dresser has to weigh more than both of us combined; it's old, antique-old, it belonged to our great-grandparents. It's probably worth something too. I have a vision of it breaking through the floor and crashing into the basement. But I just stand there, bracing myself, and I watch as it teeters forward, the floorboards creaking under its shifting weight.

And then it all stops. The dresser rests again on four feet, and he's stopped yelling. He just stands there, breathing heavy, square in front of me, and he looks at me like he sees me, like maybe he finally gets it. He pinches the bridge of his nose as his eyes fill with water, and then he shoves his knuckles into each eyeball, trying to thwart the tears. “I don't understand,” he says again, except this time it's not measured but messy and trembling. Because he does understand.

I watch as his body melts down to the floor and I start to understand something too. That this isn't all about me. This thing, it touches everyone.

MY HANDS ARE SHAKING
as I hold her business card. As the phone rings, I just read her name over and over and over.

Caelin drives me downtown, to the precinct. I bite my nails until they bleed. Caelin keeps taking these enormous breaths that he doesn't seem to be exhaling. But neither of us speaks until we're walking up the massive, terrifying steps of the building.

“Caelin, you don't have to come in with me,” I tell him, wanting to spare him. I don't think I could bear for him to hear the details.

“No, I'm not leaving you here by yourself, Edy.”

We have to empty our pockets and walk through a metal detector; police officers in bulletproof vests wave those wands over our arms and legs. And then we follow the signs that lead us on a winding path to the fourth floor. I slowly push through the double doors and search the large room full of desks and computers and chairs and phones ringing and people rushing around with clipboards and serious looks on their faces, scanning for Detective Dorian Dodgson.

“Eden, I'm so glad you could make it down here so quickly,” she says, appearing next to us. “Caelin. Good to see you again. Shall we find a quieter place to talk?”

“Detective?” I start.

“Dorian, please,” she corrects.

“Okay, Dorian. Caelin doesn't need to stay, does he?”

“Not at all.”

“Edy, I'll stay,” Caelin insists.

“Sometimes,” Dorian tells him, picking up on my fear, “with this kind of discussion, the fewer people present, the better. You understand,” she says.

He nods, and I think he's partly relieved, too. “I understand,” he says to her. “Call me when you're done, Edy, and I'll come pick you up. I'm gonna go to that bar right up the street, the one with the white-and-green awning, so I'm not far.”

He holds out a hand to shake with Dorian's, and nods, very gentlemanly.

“Thank you for bringing her in, Caelin,” she tells him. “You take care now.”

She leads me to a room that has a window and a plant and a couch and a coffee table, not at all like those interrogation rooms you see on TV.

“It may be difficult to remember some things,” she cautions as she sets a Diet Coke down on the table in front of me, “but just try, as best you can, to describe exactly what happened.”

I wish it was difficult to remember.

“He came into my room. It was 2:48—I looked at the clock—by 2:53 it was over,” I tell her, but that's not the complete truth.

Five minutes. Three hundred seconds, that's all it is. It can seem like a short amount of time or a long amount of time, depending on what's happening. You press the snooze button and wake up five minutes later—that's no time at all. But if you're giving a speech at the front of the classroom with all those eyes on you, or you're getting a cavity filled, then five minutes can feel like a long time. Or say you're being humiliated and tortured by someone you trusted, someone you grew up with, someone you loved, even . . . five minutes is forever. Five minutes is the rest of your entire fucking stupid life.

But there's no way to really explain his mouth almost touching mine. No way to describe how completely alone I felt, like there was no one in the entire world who would be able to help me or stop him. Ever. No way to say how much I truly believed him when he said he would kill me. I take a breath and look Dorian in the eye, and try to find words to explain what words could never explain.

I tell her, as best I can, every gruesome detail.

She says things like, “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm . . . in what way was he restraining your arms? Can you show me? And he penetrated you?” God, that word, “penetrate,” how could she say it? “How much force—would you say excessive? Was this before or after? Could you yell for help at that point? Can you describe, again, exactly how he inserted the nightgown into your mouth? Did you lose consciousness at any point? Did you, at any point, fear for your life? And he told you that he would kill you if you told anyone what happened?”

It takes hours. I have to say everything a million times by the end, and then she hands me my own clipboard and pad of paper and a pen, and I have to write it all down while she sits there watching. My hand cramps up after the first couple of pages. I stop and shake it out, extending my fingers.

“I guess it's pretty awful that I never told anyone?” I ask her.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, what if I would've told, and then he wouldn't have—I mean, maybe I could've stopped all of this from happening?”

“When someone threatens your life, those aren't empty words,” she states matter-of-factly.

“But what if—”

“No. No more what-ifs,” she tells me firmly. “You did the right thing by coming in, Eden.”

“How can you be sure what's right?” I ask her, thinking about how everything has to change now.

She smiles soberly and says, “It's my job to know the difference between right and wrong. This is right.”

I try to smile back.

“We're going to get this little bastard,” she says. “I'm sure of it. And he won't be able to hurt anyone else, okay?”

“Do you know about what happened to him?” I clear my throat. “When he was a kid—with his uncle, I mean?”

“Yes,” she answers. Her face doesn't change, though. She just continues looking at me, unflinching. “That was a terrible thing—yes. But it's not a free pass. Not an excuse.”

My heart floods, so full of every emotion I've ever known, all at once. Because she's right. It's no excuse. Not a free pass. Not for him. And not for me. I nod my head.

“I won't lie, Eden,” she tells me. “It'll get harder before it gets easier, but everything will be okay, I promise.”

“Everything will be okay” always sounds like a generic, useless thing that people just say when there's nothing else to be said for a situation, but those words coming out of her mouth—it sounds like the most profound thing anyone has ever said in the history of humankind.

Outside, it's dusk. Nearly night already. I can just make out the white-and-green awning. I start to descend the stairs, but I sit down on one of the steps instead. I breathe the cold air in deeply and it fills my lungs in a new way.

I take my phone out and dial a number I had memorized years ago. It rings.

“Hello?” Mrs. Armstrong answers, sounding just exhausted.

“Hi, Mrs. Armstrong. It's Edy. Is Amanda there?”

“Honey, I'm not sure she feels like talking right now. Wait—hold on a second.” And I hear her hand cover the receiver, her words muffled. Something's happening. Static and movement. It seems like a long time passes.

Then finally: “Hi,” Amanda says quietly. “Sorry, I had to go in my room.” And suddenly she sounds like herself again, the girl I used to know.

“Hi,” I respond, but I don't know what else to say to her.

“I had to tell,” she says, not wasting any time with chitchat. “I just had to.”

“Amanda, I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry too—about everything—I'm sorry for things you don't even know I should be sorry for, Edy,” she admits.

“How did you know?” I ask her.

“I could just tell. The other day at school. I could just feel it—I don't know.”

“Did he really tell you we actually slept together, like you said?”

She pauses, and says, “You know, I always looked up to you so much when we were younger. I don't know if you ever knew that. He knew that, anyway. And he tried to make me believe that it was okay. Normal. That you—if you did it, wanted to, I mean—then, you know, what could be wrong with that?” Her voice breaks up, as she tries not to cry. “The sickest part is that I actually believed him—about you—I believed every word. Until the other day.”

“I never knew any of that, Amanda, I swear.”

“I hated you. So much. As much as I should've hated him—I hated you instead. I don't know why. It's all fucked up, isn't it?” She laughs, even as she cries.

“Yeah. It's all fucked up,” I agree. “But I think it's going to get better now.”

“It has to,” she says.

“It will.”

As I walk the two blocks up the street, the air feels different, my steps against the ground feel different, the world—everything—feels different.

I push through the heavy wooden door at the bar and I'm strangled by smells of beer and smoke. I spot Caelin right away, down at the end of the bar, looking pathetic and crumpled, his hand curled loosely around a shot glass.

“Hey, hey, hey, you—girl!” the bartender yells at me. “ID.”

“No, I'm just here for my brother—over there,” I yell to him, pointing at Caelin.

The bartender walks down the length of the bar and raps his knuckles twice on the shiny wooden counter in front of Caelin. He raises his head slowly. “Time to go, buddy,” he tells him, nodding his head in my direction.

Caelin turns toward me, wobbling a little as he stands, moving slowly as he reaches for his wallet. “Edy, I said I would pick you up,” he says while ushering me out the door.